New year, new links

Happy New Year to my readers. When it stops raining I’ll take my camera out and photograph a church or two.

Over the Christmas break my daughter taught me to tweet. I am @revpeterbarham – and still find it difficult to believe that anyone is interested in me! I am finding it interesting to see what others are writing – and have found myself going down interesting pathways.

Here is a website called churchdays, lots of resources for church visitors. It has been put together by the CofE. I don’t know how long it has been around, but I’d never heard of it. An excellent timeline. A good twelve days of Christmas. Some suggested prayers (but why no link to the prayer section of the main CE website?). On the home page you can search for a church – all CE churches are listed. I only checked mine, but the details are correct and they give a link through to our church website. I’ll use this one – and would be interested in other feedback.

It also led me to this “knocking on heaven’s door” blog – some sensible comments about the joys and sorrows of visiting churches. Interestingly, the writer gives details of a keyholder app – to quote him “the Keyholder app developed by extremely well-travelled churchcrawler C. B. Newham. This Android app (Apple version in development) displays all the CoE churches in England as dots, either red (locked), blue (open) or yellow (location of key advertised by the door). It has the advantage of giving you the local knowledge to know whether a journey is worth making without a phone call. The coverage is impressive, but not complete, users are invited to fill in the gaps where they can. The data is kept reliable currently via a subscription which works out about £1.60 a month – but if you crawl regularly that’s basically the petrol money or public transport fare to the church in the first place, and the amount of money you should be leaving in the almsbox afterwards anyway.” I’ll download it at some point soon, and try it out. (Can I ask that church visitors please leave more than £1.60 in an almsbox – £1.60 doesn’t go very far. Is a fiver too much to ask? – and gift aid it).

If you live in the North East here is an event you might enjoy. Saints in Glass at Newcastle Cathedral on Thursday 14 January. I’ve booked – details here.

Wednesday is Epiphany, the Feast of the Wise Men. In Ponteland we have a 7 pm Choral Communion at St Mary’s – all welcome. My wife likes this: